'Vermut Temporal' hosted at CREAF

This November CREAF celebrated an event called Vermut Temporal, co-organised by TEB Lab member Javier de la Casa. This events aim to gather different researchers from CREAF to present their work, fostering community building. In other words, knowing what is being done is your neighbour office. This time, what connected all talks was time itself. How time shapes ecological processes, and the importance of time scale and resolution

Estefanía Muñoz, Javier de la Casa and Jordi Catalan. The scientific embassadors of the event.

Why call it a vermut rather than a seminar or a conference? Because vermut (vermouth), a traditional spiced wine, is part of Catalan charm. The aim of this gathering is to encourage collaboration and connection among researchers, and there is no better way to bring people together than sharing a vermut.

Across all 18 presentations, a shared theme clearly emerged: time is a central dimension in much of CREAF’s research. Whether the goal is to understand present-day processes or to reconstruct long-term ecological histories, temporal perspectives underpin nearly every study. Research spans a wide range of scales and resolutions, from daily monitoring of bird behaviour or tree embolism to paleoecological investigations that extend back thousands of years. Our TEB Lab mates Xaali and Sergi participated showing different aspects of our work in the group.

Xaali and Sergi presenting at the Vermut Temporal

Part of CREAF work captures change as it happens, through continuous ecosystem monitoring, measurement stations, automated cameras, and satellite technologies. Other projects look to the past, drawing on natural and historical archives such as tree rings, lake sediments, or museum collections, to reconstruct ecological processes over long time spans. Some studies also make use of open research data, both historical and recent, which broaden the temporal scope of analyses and enable comparisons across different periods. Finally, several presentations focused on analytical and interpretative tools, including the Ecological Trajectory Analysis developed our friend and colleague Miquel de Cáceres, from CREAF’s Ecosystem Modelling Facility, which supports the comparison of patterns and dynamics at the ecosystem scale.

Overall, the event highlighted CREAF’s commitment to understanding ecological processes through a comprehensive, multi-temporal lens.

Author

Javier de la Casa, PhD candidate